It's in our motto—we're always smoking something—but we're not just a one-trick pony, and lately, it seems like something is always getting baked.
We have several bakers on staff—which I wouldn't have been able to say a year ago*—but today we're showcasing one of our recent hires, Patricia. If you've been reading the 5 Things™ blog the past few weeks, there have been several mentions of her work at the Smokehaus. It's making waves.
Carrot cake cream cheese cookies, peanut butter curry cookies, triple ginger cookies. Ugh.
Patricia has been baking off-and-on for the last fifteen years. At nineteen, she attended a six-month intensive baking course at the Pacific Institute of Culinary Arts in Vancouver, British Columbia, which she described as, "pretty old-school. A lot of old French men yelling at me." Eventually, she and her brother opened Elfvin's Bakery, a wholesale bakery in Grand Marais, which they owned and operated for three years before selling it to new owners who rebranded it as the Gunflint Baking Company.
Stack these decadent cookie sandwiches high.
After a move to Duluth and several years of living it up on our end of the North Shore, she arrived at our deli, and immediately brightened it up with her easygoing and upbeat personality—and her baked goods.
Triple- (sometimes quadruple-) ginger cookies.
In addition to cookies, she's also been heating things up with a variety of savory pastries, including scones using the end-pieces (see: repurposed "waste," a very exciting for our sustainability-oriented hearts and minds) of the snack sticks that we have begun cutting to exact sizes—Smoked Salmon Buddy & Scallion Cream Cheese Scones and Royale With Cheese Scones, by way of example—and rotating meat & cheese combo puff pastries. At press time, she is plotting Pastrami, Swiss & Red Onion Pastries for tomorrow. Croissants, she informed me, are coming soon, as well as crackers. The anticipation is real.
Sweet peanut butter cookies with a complex chord of curry.
Patricia is brimming with ideas of new pastries and sweet treats to debut in the shop, and we're grateful for it. As her coworkers, we are the first line of defense in testing these treats for proverbial "poison." It's not much, but it's honest (and delicious) work.
The savory pastries make for a quick and easy light lunch. Non-sandwiched cookies are also an option with your Box Lunch. Enjoy a few more photos of her work. Perhaps stop in and enjoy a few examples of her work in-person.
Scones by Patricia, Cheddar Chive Chorizo Biscuits by Jerry.
This one looks like a map. I like that.
Helpful diagram.
*My baker comment might be taken as fighting words amongst our talented staff. Surely, we have many talented bakers among our coworkers, but only recently have we utilized their talents in a large-scale commercial sense.
It feels like it has been forever, but we’re back on our pop-up game. Tonight, from 5 until we run out of food, we’ll be serving up brats at Hoops Brewing. On the menu, we have Italian sausage with roasted red peppers and onion and beer brats with sauerkraut, with potato salad and creamy Koolslaw available as sides.
Patricia, a new member of our team, has been blowing our minds with a variety of cookies and pastries, and we threw a dozen of them in the grab & go case this week: carrot cake cookie sandwiches with honey cream cheese.They went fast, but I doubt this is the last we’ll see of them. See, part of the vetting process is that we all have to test them. And, um, we're going to want to test them again pretty soon here, I'd imagine.Basically, here is your reminder that stopping into our deli and seeing what kind of new flavor-of-the-day/week/month specials and deals we have for you is not a terrible idea. We’re always coming up with something new.